The Tahara House

In 1912 the Jewish congregation erected a Tahara House (ritual washing house), commonly referred to as a funeral hall, in the southwestern corner of the cemetery. Betty and Moritz Jacobsohn donated the building in memory of their son Albert, who had died at a young age: a simple brick structure with a ground plan measuring 6.90 by 5.80 metres. The interior furnishings were modest. Light entered through a large rose window and several small high-set windows. A continuous band of natural stone was incorporated into the façade. Above the entrance appeared a Star of David and the verse from the Psalms: “The Eternal redeems the souls of those who serve Him” (Psalm 34:23)

From 1938 onward, the building underwent repeated alterations. During the Nazi period it was used as a storage shed for the municipal parks department and as a carpentry workshop, while its original character was deliberately obscured: the Jewish symbols were covered with cement, the rose window was destroyed, and new windows were installed. In 1960, in response to acts of vandalism, these windows were bricked up and new doors inserted.

When the funeral hall began to deteriorate in the 1980s, the building was secured and renovated. A memorial plaque was installed on the exterior, and inside the funeral hall, which was not open to the public, the names of those buried in the cemetery were documented.

In 2022 the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation in Lüneburg initiated a conservation-based restoration of the funeral hall and collected donations for the project. Restoration work began in the spring of 2023 and continued until the spring of 2024. Conservators identified the original colour scheme from 1912 and were able to carefully restore the historic appearance of the building. The rose window, the other windows, and the Jewish symbols were reconstructed. Today the funeral hall serves as a place of learning, encounter, and remembrance.

Further information about the renovation of the mourning hall can be found here.

The commemorative plaque

The commemorative plaque was installed in 1989 in front of one of the bricked-up window niches of the mourning hall, where it remained visible until the beginning of the renovation work in 2023. According to more recent research, some of the dates and historical connections presented at the time were not entirely accurate:

The first burial took place in 1828 (not 1827). During the November Pogrom of 1938, and already before the last burial in 1939 (not only afterwards), gravestones were overturned and graves desecrated. The city of Lüneburg appropriated the site and ordered the clearance of the cemetery in the winter of 1943/44 in order to build temporary housing for “ethnic Germans” and people whose homes had been destroyed by bombing. For this purpose, all graves were removed, and only a few gravestones were reused as foundation material for the new temporary housing. The leveled ground was used by the residents as vegetable gardens until 1947. In 1965, the city installed only a single central memorial stone (rather than individual gravestones). It was not until the demolition of the temporary housing in 1967 that the gravestones embedded in the foundations were rediscovered. In 1972 (and not 1965), they were arranged in a row at the edge of the former burial ground.